Google searches can predict game sales

By Latif Salman on 09/25/2012 12:10 PDT

Google is the undisputed champion of the world of web search. And this position has granted it the ability to command a massive number of users to a whole lot of other services. It has also enabled Google to discern different trends, thanks to the huge amounts of search-related data at hand.

Now the company has released a whitepaper titled “Understanding the Modern Gamer” which goes on to show that the behaviours of the gamers can be predicted from the search queries they punch into Google.

What is intriguing about this paper is that it goes on to claim that there is a direct relation between Google searches by gamers and game sales. The greater the number of searches made about a particular game, the higher are its actual sales.

To substantiate this claim, the paper cites that searches of top 20 games of 2010 and 2011 were tracked. Based on this data, the research team predicted that if a game attracted 250,000 clicks within the ten months near its launch, it leads to some 2 to 4 million copies sold during the first four months of the launch.

This hypothesis, we are told, was able to predict 84 percent of game sales. This means that it is nearly accurate enough to be used as a very important tool by the gaming industry to gauge the expected sales of upcoming titles.